Confirmation bias: when we only see what we want to see

Some people identify the heart with emotion and the brain with the rational. It's a mistake. As many studies indicate, irrationality is perfectly integrated into the functioning of our nervous system, which includes the human brain.

One of the aspects of our behavior in which this irrational component is most noticeable are biases cognitive, that is, deformations in the way of reasoning that are usually unconscious and involuntary. One of the most frequent is the confirmation bias, very frequent both in our daily life and in our professional life. Let's see what it consists of.

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What is confirmation bias?

In short, confirmation bias is a propensity to give more importance and credibility to data that fits with our beliefs than those who contradict them, although initially both information are equally well founded.

This bias is not only negative because it contributes to our ideas not changing. Furthermore, under its effect we run the risk of believing that totally debatable and opinionable ideas are almost revealed truths, purely objective knowledge that it would be unwise to put under suspicion. In other words, the confirmation bias is the worst enemy of philosophy, since it constantly reinforces the ideas that we have automatically decided to believe at all costs.

The role of cognitive dissonance

The cognitive dissonance It is a well-known concept in the field of psychology, and consists of the feeling of discomfort that we experience when an idea conflicts with one of our beliefs.

Sometimes we learn to manage this discomfort in a constructive way by modifying our explanations about reality, and others we do not get it and we limit ourselves to manipulate those ideas of any way so that the importance of what we have been believing from before prevails. Confirmation bias is one of those elements that leads us to discard provocative ideas simply because they are.

To better understand what a confirmation bias is and how cognitive dissonance can be mismanaged, let's look at some examples based on a fictional case.

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Examples of confirmation bias

Let's imagine that, after visiting some web pages belonging to far-right parties, a person begins to haunt the idea that the black population originating in various African countries is less intelligent than Europeans and Asians.

According to this point of view, poverty and the little technological development experienced in these regions is due to a lower cognitive ability in the average of the inhabitants of this region. This is a seductive idea, because it offers us a simple explanation about a phenomenon that before we thought more complex, and thanks to this, and even if he does not realize it, that person begins to attribute the poverty and misfortunes suffered in these areas to the low intelligence of these people.

However, as his ideas do not fit well with the thinking of many of his neighbors, this person's beliefs are soon confronted. Some say that assuming the intellectual inferiority of the black population is very gratuitous, especially considering that very little is yet known about what makes some people more or less smart. Given this, the person realizes that whoever replies in this way is known to be a left-wing activist, and therefore assumes that his vision of reality has been distorted by propaganda progressive. This makes you ignore what he says.

Another person points out that even though slavery practically no longer exists in Western countries, the poverty of past generations of blacks still affects the education of new ones. generations, and that is why the development of many children is complicated by poor quality schooling, poor nutrition and other factors that have been shown to contribute to the CI decrease. But this explanation, in the eyes of the other, is too convoluted, and therefore he rejects it: the simplest explanation it has to be that this tendency to low intelligence is in people's own biology.

Finally, a neighbor objects that even among middle-class black people, the stigma placed on black people in general because of the racism has the power to make their life expectancies much more modest, which is why they do not give so much importance to education from a young age and that, for Consequently, they arrive with more insecurity and less experience to intelligence tests, batteries of exercises that are very reminiscent of everything that is done in the academic context. But this explanation is still not as simple and "hermetic" as the idea that black people are less intelligent, so it is also taken as a deformation of reality to make it fit your own ideology.

In the future, this person will notice all the representations of black people that appear on television and other media, and each time who sees a murder case by an African American citizen, for example, will attribute it to the latter's inability to earn a living civilized. On the other hand, when you see a black person who has been successful in life and has excellent training and education, you will attribute it to the influence that “white culture” has had on him.

Ignoring what contradicts us, accepting what reaffirms us

As we have seen in the example, the confirmation bias can have dramatic consequences in the way we interpret reality. For example, it makes the simplicity of a belief be seen as a positive quality of it, regardless of the dangers involved. entail simplifications: it can lead us to circular thinking, because such a simple belief explains everything and at the same time does not explain nothing.

On the other hand, another characteristic of the confirmation bias is that it makes all the experiences that can be used to reinforcing a belief immediately captures our attention, while those that contradict us are ignored or, at most, lead to tiptoe over them, looking for any explanation that allows us to see that our ideas do not have to be threatened.

In the example, hypotheses based on social influence and education are discarded systematically in favor of an explanation based on biology, but the opposite occurs when seeing a black person and much more educated than the average citizen: in this case, the explanation is in the Social.